The world of mobile networking is dramatically changing due to the new 5G technologies, which will contribute to the development of a smarter and interconnected planet by means of a ubiquitous and faster network. These ambitious plans will establish new challenges in the networking field. In particular, one of the objectives to pursue is to find a way for increasing the performance of network middleboxes, by means of the virtualization of network functions and the smart orchestration of traffic flows. The introduction of NFV technologies may bring many benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility, but there are some drawbacks too, in terms of performance, compared to the solutions based on purpose-built hardware tightly coupled with network function software.